The present disclosure generally relates to an adaptive active suspension and aware vehicle network system and method, and more particularly relates to a system and method enabling real-time streaming of active suspension performance parameters to any aware vehicle in an aware vehicle network.
There are many vehicles currently in the market that employ an active suspension system. Most of these existing systems are configured by the vehicle manufacturer to sense the conditions of a road being driven on via onboard sensors and reactively change suspension characteristics to improve the comfort level or driving dynamics of the vehicle. For example, the 2009 Acura MDX applies an active damper system, which has a comfort setting and a sport setting.
Even though active systems can offer significant improvement over vehicles with conventional non-active suspension systems, the active suspension vehicles must sense present driving conditions and react. As a result, the customer driving such a vehicle might unexpectedly and/or undesirably experience a change in the handling performance of a vehicle as the system reacts to a new input. Also, some vehicles offer different settings (e.g., comfort, sport, etc.), but require the customer to choose the setting in advance. Accordingly, if the customer selects the sport setting and then hits a bump unexpectedly, he or she may experience a large vibration; conversely, if the customer selects the comfort setting and then has to abruptly maneuver around the obstacle, the vehicle may not respond as well as if it were in the sport mode prior to encountering the obstacle.